World News Quick Take

Agencies

NEW ZEALAND

Mother drugs baby with milk

A woman has admitted giving her three-month-old baby cannabis — through her breast milk, it was reported yesterday. The 29-year-old, from the North Island town of Wanganui, was sentenced to six months’ supervision after pleading guilty to administering the drug to her baby, the Wanganui Chronicle said. Police, who arrested the woman following a search of her house for drugs, said her actions amounted to child abuse. However, University of Auckland law professor Warren Brookbanks said it was unlikely the case would have succeeded had the woman denied the charge.

POLAND

Historic tank returned

A tank used by the country in its 1920 war against the Red Army was returned from Afghanistan, where it was serving as a decoration at the defense ministry. Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said Friday the French-made FT-17 tank has “historic and sentimental value” for Poland. According to historians, it probably was captured by the Bolsheviks during the war, and later sent to Kabul as a gift. It was spotted at the Ministry of Defense in Kabul by an Afghan employee of the embassy, according to Piotr Lukasiewicz, the ambassador to Kabul. After maintenance, it will be displayed at the Polish Armed Forces Museum, Siemoniak said. Europe has only three such tanks, the museum says.

SYRIA

Rebels rescue toddler

No one knows how long little Bushr al-Tawashi wandered alone in the rubble of his home in the capital before rebel fighters found the toddler and handed him over to another family to look after. Now, the two-year-old is back with his parents — who believed he had been killed. In their chaotic haste to escape fighting between government troops and rebels, Bushr’s parents had assumed the boy was picked up by other members of their extended family who were staying with them when clashes broke out last summer in the Damascus suburb of al-Kaboun. Heavy fighting prevented the parents from going back to search for Bushr once they arrived at a refugee camp and realized he was missing, said Stella Constantinou, a Cypriot lawyer. Believing he did not survive the shelling, the boy’s grief-stricken father, Machhour al-Tawashi, and his wife, Arin al-Dakkar, arrived in Cyprus on Aug. 6 along with their two other sons, ages four and six, in search of asylum. Word the boy was safe eventually reached the parents. The Cypriot Foreign Ministry expedited the process of reuniting the boy with his family after his parents provided proof he was their child. Bushr’s father then traveled to Beirut, where he was reunited with the boy at the Cypriot embassy. He brought Bushr back to the island on Thursday.

ITALY

Ex-Nazis’ sentences upheld

A military court of appeal in Rome on Friday upheld the life sentences passed on three ex-Nazis for the killing of hundreds of civilians during World War II. The three were among nine former soldiers, mostly in their nineties and tried in their absence, who were given life sentences in July last year for the killings in villages in northern Italy in 1944. Of the nine three have since died and three others were acquitted by the appeal court on Friday. The men were part of the Hermann Goering division which had tried to break the back of the Italian resistance and indiscriminately slaughtered civilians, including 140 in the Modena region alone. The sentences were also for massacres carried out in other parts of the Emilia Romagna region and near Arezzo in Tuscany.